Culture and Capitalism

The 2023 CU football season generated an estimated $113 million for Boulder’s economy across six home games. The 2024 Sundance Film Festival brought $132 million to Utah. South by Southwest poured $377 million into Austin that same year.

These aren’t just statistics; they are proof that cultural capital drives economic capital. When IBM arrived in Boulder in 1965, it transformed the city’s economic base and seeded what would become a high-tech hub. From 1,000 initial hires to more than 4,000 within a few years, IBM didn’t just build a campus—it changed Boulder’s destiny.

Today, Boulder is striving to transition from digital to quantum computing. With CU’s help, Boulder aims to utilize culture as a magnet to attract physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and experts in large language models to shape the next technological frontier.

Yet we return to the old riddle: does culture create prosperity, or prosperity culture? Did the Medici give rise to Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, or did genius itself summon its patrons? From Egypt to Athens, from the Vatican to Florence, power, money, and culture have always moved in concert.

If Boulder hopes to become the Athens of the West and the Palo Alto of the Rockies, it must nourish its cultural soul by supporting Sundance with infrastructure and fully commit to growing the Roots Music Festival into its own version of South by Southwest.

Dan Caruso of Caruso Ventures stands at the vanguard of this vision. To deepen our shared understanding of what lies ahead at the intersection of culture, capital, and technology, City Club will host a screening of The Quantum Insider—a glimpse into the forces that may soon redefine both humanity’s future and Boulder’s role within it.

— Sina.